How long can Sky charge for HD

[Anonymous]

professorhat:

To be fair though, it's not the technology which is at fault, but the application of the technology. I'm positive an LCD or Plasma TV which was designed to display a PAL signal would look just as good as the old CRT TVs. The issue is, these new sets are not designed for this, they're designed to display HD pictures and thus SD signals have to be upscaled and picture quality suffers as a result. And it's the likes of the US and Japan which are driving manufacturers to produce HD sets. These markets already have mature HD broadcasts available to them meaning ordinary folk there are demanding HD sets and as a byproduct, we're getting these sets too.

Without this though, I'm pretty sure progress wouldn't occur - after all, why would anyone in the UK go to the expense of making and broadcasting HD signals if no one had sets ready to receive them?

That is a very good point professorhat.

But TV has always been an easy technology to buy into up till now. Black and white to colour, and that was about it. The public could buy a simple product that was easy to understand. Now it is very complicted. Maybe not to many people on here, but some of my parents generation find it like a mine filed. And it is getting very expenseive. I understand why people on here are quite happy to fork out £500 or so for Sky and HD but many people can't pay that amount of money.

I cringe when I see the quality of some LCD tvs in my friends, and relations houses. Not to put to fine a point on it the picture quality is rubbish. You wonder if they rerally think what they are watching is better than what they had before.

 

[Anonymous]

tvspecv:i wonder what other countries charge for these type of services i.e japan china etc their broadband etc are much faster than the uk i dont think they pay as much

The american sub TV services charge extra for HD. Japans not really as relevant as they embrace new tech so much the wholesale price falls rapidly- if there were mass uptake in this country then virgin might pull their HD finger out and sky would be forced to react.

Never understood why people single HD subs out as "unfair", it's a topic that seems to keep repeating. Everything "better" than standard carries a premium, always has done and always will do. HD will become bog standard one day and there'll no doubt be bitter complaints that sky charge a premuim for 3D or whatever.

 

[Anonymous]

professorhat:
To be fair though, it's not the technology which is at fault, but the application of the technology. I'm positive an LCD or Plasma TV which was designed to display a PAL signal would look just as good as the old CRT TVs. The issue is, these new sets are not designed for this, they're designed to display HD pictures and thus SD signals have to be upscaled and picture quality suffers as a result. And it's the likes of the US and Japan which are driving manufacturers to produce HD sets. These markets already have mature HD broadcasts available to them meaning ordinary folk there are demanding HD sets and as a byproduct, we're getting these sets too.

Without this though, I'm pretty sure progress wouldn't occur - after all, why would anyone in the UK go to the expense of making and broadcasting HD signals if no one had sets ready to receive them?

I don't think that's strictly true, it's the size of TV's we have today that require higher resolutions. PAL owes it's origins to a time when a TV of over 30" was exotic and quite rare. People with big screen projectors would use line doublers (at enormous cost back then!) to improve the PAL feed. A 26" HD set will look pretty much the same fed vial 576 or 1080 in most settings.

Are you saying a 50" set with a native 576 lines will look significantly better than a 1080 line set upscaling the picture?

 

[Anonymous]

Murdoch is well know for trading political support for commercial favours. As long as politicians believe he can shape voters opinions and he continues to back the right horse at election time, Sky will have a near monopoly and UK customers will pay more than other Europeans for sports etc... He has made a deal with the Conservatives this time so if they win as expected expect no change or things to get worse, the BBC to be made less compeditive, particularly its news coverage which is in competion with Sky news on foreign networks, and possibly leading to Sky news then leaving free to view.

 

[Alec]

Um...i dont complain about the license fee and find the idea that people who complain about one would comlain about the other a bit...well, silly, frankly.

However, i must admit i dont have premium films or sports either, so theres little point me having my HD box at the moment. Whats more, Im very happy with some of the SD i get.

Still, cant complain. i went into it knowing which hd channels id get and how much it would cost. might review things after my initial contract is up tho, unless theres been huge progress (which im not optimistic about).

yes, todays TVs look worse with SD than HD, and worse than CRTs with SD of course. Who or what we should blame for that is academic, the horse has bolted.

And Sky will charge, as others have said, until they decide not to or til serious competition comes along.

Next! (my, i seem crabby today)

(EDIT - crabby, illiterate, syntactically challenged but whats new?).

 

[ukdavej]

IMHO it is quite simple, as long as people are prepared to pay, they (whoever "they" may be) will continue to charge. In the UK, consumer is not king, I don't think it's in our nature. We grumble, then pay up and just get on with it. If there was a mass of cancellations to HD then the companies would start to look at their pricing structures. I'm not anti sky by any means (even though I'm not a subscriber) I think if you watch a good deal of telly and like sports/films or both, their content is unrivalled and the premium channels are reasonable value.

 

[tvspecv]

filmfour is pretty good quality on v+ though looks great